Russian athletes who have never been found to have taken performance drugs will get a chance to persuade their sports federations to let them compete, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has decided. The world governing body’s ruling 15-member executive board met Sunday via teleconference — with the Rio Games’ August 5 opening ceremony less than two weeks away — and decided that responsibility for ruling on the eligibility of Russians remains with the international federations. It issued a tricky “guilty until proven innocent” type of condition to the Russians. “Under these exceptional circumstances, Russian athletes in any of the 28 Olympic summer sports have to assume the consequences of what amounts to a collective responsibility in order to protect the credibility of the Olympic competitions, and the ‘presumption of innocence’ cannot be applied to them,” the IOC said.
NATURAL JUSTICE
But the IOC then added that the rules of natural justice mean that each athlete must be given the opportunity to show that such collective responsibility is not applicable in his or her individual case. Last week, Canadian law professor Richard McLaren produced an official report which described extensive doping and cover-ups across a series of summer and winter Olympic sports and particularly at the Sochi Winter Olympics hosted by Russia in 2014. Doping agency was rotten from the top down
